When You Don’t Hear What You Want to Hear

We’ve all been in this situation: You hand off a chapter or entire manuscript to a workshop or agent or editor, and you hope to hear that things are working pretty well except for a few tics and clarity issues, and what you hear instead is that on some basic level the pages aren’t working. You thought you’d already addressed the problems. You thought you’d finally found a way to rearrange the material so that its complexity and beauty have both risen exponentially. Nope. The pages still aren’t functioning to their potential, or their potential has been reached and the piece remains flat or clichéd or in need of an explosion or alien invasion. What the hell are you supposed to do now? First, don’t despair. Really. This has happened to everyone. Take a moment to breathe, to think about the positives in your piece, to remember all you’ve learned in the process of producing those pages. Then you have a few choices:

1. You can give up. Just pick up your manuscript and disappear. If people aren’t going to say you’re good, they don’t deserve your presence. This, of course, is the most mature response.
2. You can just keep sending out the manuscript as it stands. Maybe someone will like it. After all, it was just one opinion. But if you keep getting the same response, you can either fall back on #1 or move on to #3.
3. You can take the critique to heart. You don’t have to agree with everything you’ve been told, you don’t even need to care what anyone says, except to the point that the critique forces you to look at your work with fresh eyes. Sure, they were wrong about this or that, so ignore them on those points. But clearly things can be working better, and you have to figure out where and how.
4. You can remember what your original idea was, and focus on how that idea has grown and morphed over time. Your readers see a certain potential in your work, and maybe that potential isn’t at all what you had in mind or even what you want to write. Maybe you’ve gotten off on the wrong track, and you no longer understand how your pages are coming across to your readers. Do your readers’ comments offer a potential for your piece that seems more interesting and complex than what you thought you were writing? It might be worth your while to take some time to sketch out that new version, to see if there are parts of it that you can incorporate in your story.
5. You can start over. Yes, we’ve all been in this situation, too. The manuscript isn’t working, so you figure out why, you figure out a solution, and you open your notebook (or open a new document on your computer) and start again. It’s not a big deal. It’s called “writing.”
6.  Here’s the big one: You can put the project aside and chalk it up to experience. Are you willing to do the work to make the pages function to their highest potential? Maybe. Maybe not. If you’ve lost your momentum, if you feel despair rather than joy as you write, maybe you should be writing something else.

I’ve done all of these steps more than once, myself (well, I never did give up—I never took my soccer ball and left the field, and I’m pretty sure that you’re not going to do that, either). I’ve dropped projects altogether. I’ve started over. I’ve cut hundreds of pages that weren’t working, even though I might have eventually made them work through pure force of endless effort. But I learned from each and every step along the way. I learned to let go of all that hard work, to put my ego aside, to challenge myself in the face of a hard critique. They want me to make this part shorter? I’ll make it longer, and I’ll knock their socks off in the process. If you have the guts to make it as a writer, you need to be able to rise to every challenge along the way, to come back with a manuscript that doesn’t just address the surface problems but raises the stakes and the craft to new levels. It’s a tough business. Your ego will be battered more than once. But the most amazing part of working with aspiring writers is seeing how many of them respond to critiques with courage and true artistry. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s brave. It’s at the core of being a writer.